Book Description

The history books record that John Brown led the failed raid on the federal armory at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, and was hanged for his crimes on December 2, 1859. It is perhaps less well known that he was the son of Ohio abolitionists; a divinity school dropout; a loyal husband and doting father of twenty children; a chronic business failure and bankrupt; an acquaintance of Emerson and Thoreau; an intimate of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman; and a visionary who not only foresaw but made inevitable the bloody apocalypse that was the American Civil War. Employing a provocative, wide-ranging collage of literary mediums and fictional devices - including private correspondence, diary and journal excerpts, newspaper articles, songs, poems, folktales, interviews, oral reminiscences, speeches, scriptural citations, epigraphs, interior monologues, and eyewitness recollections - the lot served up in an intricate mosaic of alternating narrative voices, Raising Holy Hell creates a colorful, multitextured evocation both of American slavery and of its most devout and deadly foe.